Arkansas' Real Welfare Queen

By Doug Monroe, Creative Loafing (Atlanta). Posted July 26, 2005.

Acworth, Georgia is way too far north in Cobb County to use Marietta's Big Chicken as a landmark. You used to be able to give directions by telling people to look for the Wal-Mart Supercenter on North Cobb Parkway. But pretty soon you won't even be able to do that, because there will be a second Wal-Mart Supercenter on North Cobb Parkway, just three miles away.

Statewide, we've already got 93 Wal-Mart Supercenters, 19 regular-sized Wal-Marts, 21 Sam's Clubs and nine distribution centers. We've got Wal-Marts out the wal-zoo.

Some people are whining about having Wal-Marts back to back in Acworth. They complained that they didn't get to object to the City Council about the big new store. Well, too bad for them! This is a new America. People don't count. Corporations do.

The land in Acworth already was zoned for big-box retailers. Wal-Mart just strolled in and fired that mother up.

In other communities, the company might not have it so easy, because a lot of ordinary Americans have awakened to the locust-like nature of Wal-Mart. The stores swoop in, kill off mom-and-pop businesses, and empty small town centers.

Meanwhile, to save every last nickel, the boys in Bentonville force their contractors to set up operations in China. Then, Wal-Mart merrily abandons stores when they grow old, leaving them behind like used condoms on the roadside.

The formula works like a charm. Wal-Mart now rakes in nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars annually in sales and plans to triple in size.

Just last month, the Supreme Court helped the company clear a hurdle that might have gotten in the way of that growth by ruling that the government can take your property to make way for a new Wal-Mart or Home Depot. Some conservative commentators tried to paint the court's action as a "liberal" decision. The hell it is. It is a pro-corporate decision. It benefits big business. And just in case you haven't been paying attention, big business and big government have merged under President Bush.

That kind of teamwork isn't always in America's best interests. PBS recently re-ran its "Frontline" special about Wal-Mart, showing a mass company meeting that was as red-white-and-blue as the Republican National Convention. But if you look beyond the flag-waving, you can see that Wal-Mart regularly ditches patriotism in its ruthless drive for the bottom line, like the time it sided with the Chinese against a Tennessee TV maker who accused China of dumping TVs in the United States.

The problem with Wal-Mart and other giant corporations sending so many American dollars to China is this: The mobsters who run China's government aren't necessarily our friends. A Chinese general said last week that his country is prepared to nuke us if we interfere with its potential takeover of Taiwan, according to the Financial Times. And even without nuclear war, China is crushing us in economic warfare. Its foreign reserves are on track to top $1 trillion next year. China is going to own our sorry, credit-card-addicted asses.

What really makes me sick is the way Wal-Mart preys on governments here at home. The flag-waving company, based in Arkansas, has become the welfare queen of Georgia. There are 51,821 Wal-Mart employees -- or "associates" -- in the state, or 1.15 percent of the total civilian work force of about 4.5 million.

The funny thing is that, while Wal-Mart has 1.15 percent of Georgia's work force, in 2002, children of its employees made up more than 6 percent of all the kids covered by PeachCare, the state program that provides health care coverage to the children of the working poor.

Of a total of 166,000 children covered by PeachCare, 10,261 had a parent working for Wal-Mart in 2002. And Wal-Mart's numbers are way out of line when you bring other companies into the picture. The No. 2 company on the list, Publix, had only 734 children of employees on PeachCare. The average PeachCare recipient costs $1,274 a year. If you multiply that by Wal-Mart's 10,261, you get a total of more than $13 million in health care costs borne by Georgia taxpayers.

Doug Monroe is a senior editor at Creative Loafing in Atlanta.

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